New Website Urges Women to Talk About Their Abortions—On Video

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Sherry Matusoff Merfish spent 20 years working at EMILY's List, campaigning for pro-choice Democratic women. She raised two feminist daughters, Beth Matusoff Merfish and Brett Matusoff Merfish, with frequent talks about contraception and passionate political debates at the dinner table. Reproductive rights were a family issue. Yet she never told her daughters about her own abortion until each was getting ready to leave home for college.

"I was open about everything else in my life, but this was one thing I did not reveal," Sherry, 65, says. "For women my age, there's a lot of shame. It wasn't legal then. We were made to feel dirty, criminal even. I've spent my whole life dedicated to campaigning for women's rights, and I still couldn't shake that feeling, so I stayed silent."

She is silent no longer. Sherry and her daughters have teamed up with patient advocate Emily Letts to create a new website called NotAlone.us, launching today. It will be the first online open forum for women to tell their abortion stories on camera.

The stigma of abortion weighs heavily on every woman who has gone through it—whether she did so surrounded by loved ones or shrouded in secrecy. About half of all pregnancies in the U.S. are unintended, and 1.3 million of these women have an abortion every year. One-third of all American women will have at least one abortion before the age of 45. This is a shared experience that touches women of every race, socio-economic class, and age. And yet no one wants to talk about it.

Last year, Sherry shared her story with the world when Beth wrote an op-ed for TheNew York Times called, "My Mother's Abortion." The response to that article—hundreds of e-mails, phone calls, and personal confessions from women opening up about their own abortion stories—provoked the idea for Not Alone.

"What was immediately clear to us was there needed to be a vehicle for women to come forward to tell their stories," Sherry says. "We felt a responsibility to the women sharing their lives with us. We didn't know if it would be a nonprofit, a community center, or a political campaign. We just knew we had an opportunity to make a difference."

The Merfish women met Emily online earlier this year and would soon know what form Not Alone would take. Emily, a 25-year-old patient advocate at Cherry Hill Women's Center in New Jersey, found Beth's article online and felt compelled to reach out. She was looking for a place to share her own abortion story. The two talked about a lot that day and kept in touch.

In May, when Emily talked to me about filming her own abortion and her video reached millions within a week, she felt compelled to call Beth again. Though her video sparked global media coverage, it was just one story. She knew changing the stigma of abortion—and getting women to talk openly about it—was going to take more than one woman's account. Still, the Merfish women realized the power in Emily's video.

They joined forces and decided that Not Alone would be a website with a single mission: Get as many women as possible to tell their abortion stories on video. Anyone can visit the site to view real women talking about their abortions, then film and upload stories of their own using YouTube or any other video-sharing software. Every time a woman shares a video, a donation will be made to Provide, which trains health care providers on safe abortion procedures in communities with few or no abortion clinics. The team has collected about a dozen videos so far from women in their personal networks and hope for that number to grow by word of mouth.

"We have young women, older women, and people who want to make videos with their loved ones," Emily says. "One woman set up a camera and had a conversation with her son. She told him how she decided to have an abortion when she was 30 and he was 13. It was really powerful for her to share this moment. I made a video with my own mother. She was really nervous about making a video, but she saw Sherry's video on the website and she was like, 'I can do that. I want to do that.' Even though my mother never spoke about her abortion to anyone, she saw in a peer the courage and power of telling that story."

The power lies in seeing the woman behind the story, says Beth, 31, an art history professor at the University of Colorado, Boulder. "When you create a video, you're simulating a conversation. Part of what makes Emily's video so powerful is that you feel like you know her. And we all know someone who has had an abortion. When you look into the eyes of a person you know and love, you can no longer think in stereotypes. That image of the kind of woman who gets an abortion disappears."

"As much as this is personal, we want to make sure our politicians make laws that ensure that our reproductive rights are protected," says Brett, 33, a nonprofit attorney in Austin. "This isn't just a self-help campaign, but something we hope makes a real difference in terms of cultural and legislative change."

While the feminist community has been pushing for openness and acceptance of abortion for decades—from an early issue of Ms. Magazine thatchronicles the horrors of illegal abortion to the recent analysis of abortion stigma in pop culture by a collective of feminist press—the narratives have existed mostly in print, and largely away from the mainstream. Even the 2005 documentary I Had an Abortion by feminist activist Jennifer Baumgardner, which recorded 11 multigenerational women telling their abortion stories, existed largely underground. It's available only to academics or for private screenings.

This might be the year when the conversation comes out of the shadows. The new film, Obvious Child, which chronicles the life—and abortion—of a twentysomething stand-up comedian in New York, is opening in theaters nationwide just as women's reproductive rights are being threatened more than ever. Last week, the Supreme Court overturned a law in Massachusetts that protected patients from street harassment on their way to a clinic appointment. Six states have only one abortion clinic left, and a new law in Louisiana may bring that number to seven very soon. And legislators are still trying to make personhood laws happen.

"To some, what we are doing sounds drastic," Emily says. "A lot of the criticism I hear is that abortion is too private. We shouldn't be talking about it, much less filming it. But if we don't take strong measures like this, these laws are going to win. We are going to lose our rights."

Sherry made the decision to go public with her own abortion story while sitting on the floor of the Texas legislature with her daughters during the Wendy Davis filibuster last year. Davis talked for 11 hours in an attempt to stop legislation that would all but guarantee the closure of abortion clinics across Texas. (It later passed, and it has done just that.) As she listened to Davis read story after story of women's experiences with abortion, she got angry.

"I would have never dreamt that in 2014 we would find ourselves in a position where safe, accessible abortion is being challenged and eliminated in so many states, and doctors are afraid to perform this procedure," she says. "I knew I had to break the silence. With my story—with any woman's story—someone else can feel affirmed about the decisions that she has made. And she can recognize that she's one of many. There is no need to feel ashamed. In fact, women should feel a responsibility. I know it's hard. It's not easy being called a baby killer or even being a woman who possesses sexuality today. But just because something is difficult doesn't mean you shouldn't speak up. You must. The only way to win back our rights is to show how important they are to us."